When the Truths We Hold Self-Evident Turn False
This report just in: Everything you know is wrong. Sorry to break the news, but don’t feel bad--tomorrow you’ll probably believe something completely different.
Why, only a few weeks ago, it seems, we all knew exactly what was right and what to think. Only a few weeks ago, we held these truths to be self-evident: CEOs were civic role models, the safest place for your kid to play was the frontyard, and only fools and knaves didn’t have their life savings in the stock market.
Pasta and bread were good for you; red meat was bad. Estrogen replacement therapy was heaven-sent for women of a certain age, and arthroscopic knee surgery was a miracle cure for scores of arthritis sufferers.
How’d we know all this? Conventional wisdom, of course--that venerable stockpile of essential suppositions, eternal verities and time-tested beliefs that we rely on to muddle through our otherwise clueless daily lives.
But today we know better. Today we’re enlightened. Today we hold these truths to be self-evident: CEOs are scoundrels. The safest place for your kids to play is an underground bunker with armed guards, lest they join the recent wave of child-napping victims. And only fools and knaves don’t have their life savings in bonds and T-bills.
Today’s conventional wisdom also holds that too many carbs can kill you, but big, juicy steaks may be wonderfully healthful (according to a recent New York Times Sunday magazine cover story). Hormone replacement therapy can cause breast cancer, heart attacks, blood clots and strokes; and arthroscopic surgery may be no more salutary than a pinprick.
Thank goodness that’s settled ... except that it’s not. Because in dazed and confused times, like the present age, there’s nothing with a shorter shelf life than conventional wisdom.
“It’s almost as if the problem with conventional wisdom is that it really isn’t,” says E. David Sosa, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. “If it really is wisdom, then there’s no problem with it being conventional. The problem is when it’s not really wisdom.”
So what is it then? Call it orthodoxy, truisms, dogma, the collective superego, urban legends or old wives’ tales. By whatever name, the tribal gods are toppling. Everywhere you look, conventional wisdom is under siege as the country frets about whether to buy! buy! buy! or sell! sell! sell!; whether to worry more about global warming or dirty bombs; and whether to ask the waitress to hold the rice pilaf or the blue cheese dressing.
On Wall Street, irrational exuberance has given way to irrational pessimism. On Main Street, there’s a feeling that today’s “sure thing” may turn out to be tomorrow’s bum steer, that the prevailing “common sense” could morph overnight into nonsense.
Truisms Are No Longer
If the state of the nation is fundamentally sound, some commentators wonder, how come we’re suddenly acting more like Argentina than America? Perceptually, at least, the ground beneath us is shifting, and our universe seems governed by a logic more Borgesian than Newtonian.
“Truisms in general, I think, are endangered. Maybe that’s a truism too,” says humorist Ian Shoales, a.k.a. Merle Kessler, whose commentaries run on ABC’s World News Now and air Sunday mornings on KCRW (FM 89.9). “There aren’t any old wives anymore--all the old wives are taking Botox.”
Part of the problem with conventional wisdom, Shoales suggests, is that there’s simply too much of it floating around to carry much authority or credibility. It’s rare, he says, to find anyone willing to admit “I don’t know,” or “It baffles me.” “You don’t get that anymore,” Shoales says. “Everyone’s got an answer.”
Howard Fienberg, senior analyst at the Statistical Assessment Service, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., says the contemporary information overload makes it difficult even to know what the conventional wisdom is on any subject, let alone whether it’s valid.
“It’s getting harder to figure out who to trust and what to trust,” says Fienberg. “So you can say, ‘Well, I eat a lot of fiber and too much fiber is bad for me,’ and the next day come back and say, ‘Well, I need to eat the fiber for my colon.’ ”
In times past, conventional wisdom was steady and reliable, even if it was exclusive. When Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term in his influential book “The Affluent Society” (1958), he used it to designate those ironclad economic principles and political catechisms passed down from generation to generation like heirlooms.
The trouble with this type of conventional wisdom, Galbraith suggested, wasn’t necessarily that it was erroneous, but that it had been around so long that it tended to stifle creative thinking and concentrate power in the hands of the few. Favoring acceptability and expediency over logic, conventional wisdom had become a shibboleth for the elites, who used it to maintain the status quo. Conventional wisdom was the dogmatic foundation of 20th century capitalism, as unshakable and impenetrable as Gibraltar.
By contrast, some say, today’s conventional wisdom suffers from the opposite curse: It’s faddish and fleeting. It makes us not slaves to tradition but dupes to every passing intellectual fad.
In his book “Untruth--Why the Conventional Wisdom Is (Almost Always) Wrong” (Random House, 2001), journalist Robert J. Samuelson argues that conventional wisdom is “increasingly an act of intellectual or political merchandising.” The media’s need for market share, he writes, has led to a “pervasive exaggeration of both problems and solutions, because that’s what grabs attention,” a process that Samuelson calls “untruth.” This “common distortion of reality,” he emphasizes, is not “typically the result of deliberate lies” but of hyperbolic thinking.
Sensationalism Distorts
Heather MacDonald, author of “The Burden of Bad Ideas--How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society” (Ivan R. Dee, 2000), also blames faulty conventional wisdom partly on the media’s tendency toward sensationalism and its ability to perpetuate false ideas through endless repetition and reprinting. As an example, she says, the media continue to spread the misconception that relations between police and minority communities are deteriorating, despite what she says is substantial statistical and anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
“One of the risks of conventional wisdom is that once it’s in place it makes reporters complacent, and you don’t see what’s right in front of your eyes,” says MacDonald, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute in New York.
In an affluent society that affords a large degree of personal choice, MacDonald continues, people “have a sense that if we do things right we will have a happy, prosperous life. So there’s a tremendous amount of consumer reporting.
“But there is a way to misread information. I don’t think the message was ever that if you cut out fat you can eat 6,000 calories, but some people interpreted it that way. There’s a lot more information out there that people can use to improve themselves, but they don’t always seize on the whole picture.”
Small wonder that the term “conventional wisdom” has gradually taken on an even more negative connotation than Galbraith probably intended. And in today’s high-tech, entrepreneurial culture, says Sosa, there may be an additional bias against ideas that are seen as representing a herd mentality. “Maybe the idea is, ‘Well, only nerds think that way. We’ve gotta think ‘outside the box,’ ” he speculates.
Americans, of course, have always been as famous for their skepticism as their idealism. Wary of economic quackery and political snake oil, we pride ourselves on our flinty pragmatism, our resistance to the kind of trendy intellectual placebos that we imagine are the daily bread of places like Paris.
At the same time, Americans have a near-religious faith in progress and the potential for self-improvement, and a corresponding belief that the present and future are superior to the past. Some say this bipolar quality can be seen in our flip-flopping notions of conventional wisdom.
“We tend to oscillate between simply accepting whatever people tell us or kind of cynically dismissing whatever we hear,” says Joel Best, a professor and chair of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware in Newark and author of “Damned Lies and Statistics--Untangling Numbers From the Media, Politicians, and Activists” (University of California Press, 2001).
Even when conventional wisdom is supposedly grounded in cold, hard data, like statistics--or, perhaps, especially when it is--we’ve been trained to distrust it, Best says. “There’s an obvious fondness that we have for simplicity,” he says. “Practically every week we hear that coffee causes cancer, and then the next week it doesn’t. And I think this leads to a lot of frustration and confusion and suspicion of numbers.”
Looking for Red Flags
So are there any helpful hints for separating “bad” conventional wisdom from “good”? “Big, round numbers are red flags,” Best says. “I think that announcements of general trends, and particularly announcements of radical transformations, are red flags. I mean, how likely is it that the world is radically transformed? If you can’t get information about where the number comes from, that’s a red flag.”
Linda Waters, an Encino psychologist, offers another approach. Rather than listening to the latest pronouncement or prophecy, she says, we might do better to search our own feelings and seek out advice from people we know we can trust. “A good way to deal with the fact that you have internalized conventional wisdom and you’re a product of your society would be to try to make a discrimination when you’re reacting to something: Does it really feel comfortable to you on a personal level? Is it really coming from your feelings and judgments, or is it coming from somebody else?”
So the next time some pompous media swami or Nostradamus-wannabe offers a sage piece of advice--such as this one--be sure to remind him or her that human history is filled with “unsinkable” assumptions that keeled over faster than the Titanic.
For example, not so long ago we thought the first hominids climbed down from the trees a mere 4 million or 5 million years ago. Then last month, researchers in Chad said they’d found the skull of an early human ancestor dating back 7 million years. One scientist described the chimp-like creature’s braincase as “incredibly modern.”
Now, there’s some conventional wisdom to take to the bank: In 7 million years, human beings don’t appear that much smarter after all.
